Descriptions

One of the least studied areas of Information Foraging Theory
is diet: the information foragers choose to seek. For
example, do foragers choose solely based on cost, or do
they stubbornly pursue certain diets regardless of cost? Do
their debugging strategies vary with their diets? To investigate
"what" and "how" questions like these for the domain
of software debugging, we qualitatively analyzed 9 professional
developers' foraging goals, goal patterns, and strategies.
Participants spent 50% of their time foraging. Of their
foraging, 58% fell into distinct dietary patterns—mostly in
patterns not previously discussed in the literature. In general,
programmers' foraging strategies leaned more heavily
toward enrichment than we expected, but different strategies
aligned with different goal types. These and our other
findings help fill the gap as to what programmers' dietary
goals are and how their strategies relate to those goals.